It is said that baby busters do not want to be lectured; they expect to be entertained. They prefer videos to books; many of them have not learned to think in a linear fashion; they put more store that they recognize in mere impressions. As a result, they can live with all sorts of logical inconsistencies and be totally unaware of them. (How many times have I tried to explain to a university-age young person who has made some profession of faith that it is fundamentally inconsistent to claim to know and love the God of the Bible, while cohabiting with someone? They can see they are doing what the Bible forbids, but when you press them to articulate the contradiction they scuttle into inconsistency without embarrassment.) They are cynical, not idealistic. They vehemently deny the existence of absolutes: that is their one absolute. Many have never experienced principled morality in the home. They have been brought up without a coherent vision or value system, and they have embraced pragmatism with a vengeance. Many of them are furious with the preceding generation (that’s me and my generation) for being so crassly materialistic as to ruin the economy and dump a tax load onto their shoulders. On the other hand, they are no less materialistic themselves, and will vote for any candidate who promises to deliver more goodies while lowering taxes - precisely the same greedy stupidity that afflicted the generation they condemn. Pluralism is so much their creed that even when the strongest arguments are arrayed to explain, on biblical presuppositions, why morally “good” people should be rejected by the Christian God and assigned to hell, their emotions so rule their heads that very frequently no amount of argumentation is adequate. On the other hand, they tend to be interested in “spirituality” (very hazily defined), and on the whole tend to see themselves as occupying a fairly high place in the spiritual pecking order.
D.A. Carson, “The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism,” p. 45
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